Bondo Dorovskikh is ready. “Since childhood I have been dreaming about going to war, but things never really worked out,” says the Russian businessman. “Now, in Syria, we are needed.”
Last year, Mr Dorovskikh went to eastern Ukraine to fight as a volunteer alongside pro-Russian separatists in the self-declared Lugansk People’s Republic, but he returned in December. “They had told us that we were coming to the rescue of the Russian population, to fight the fascists, but it wasn’t like they told it on TV,” he says. “The enemy there was not real, and the local population didn’t support us.”
On his return to Moscow, the 41-year-old found what he thinks is a worthier cause: fighting the Islamist radicals of Isis. Since April, he has been liaising with former Donbass fighters and other Russian men keen to volunteer, and searching for ways to join the Syrian war through international volunteer units fighting alongside Kurdish formations.